Crafting gear in Allods can be interesting, fun, useful and profitable. It can also be annoying, frustrating and extremely confusing since you are given very little information as to how crafting items actually works. This little guide is meant to help clear that cloud of confusion and make crafting accessible to all new players.

1. Crafting Overview

What are the crafting professions? How do they work?

The tree crafting professions are tailoring, leatherworking and blacksmithing.

Crafters basically take materials produced by other professions (disassemblers or miners) and turn them into gear. Each profession can craft gear of one armor type: tailors craft cloth armor, leatherworkers craft leather armor and blacksmiths craft plate armor. There is no profession to craft weapons, rings or jewelry.

Is crafted gear any good? Is it worth the effort?

If you just throw random items together, probably not. If you know what you are doing and take the time and effort to craft high quality gear, absolutely. Crafted blue (rare) grade items are extremely useful while leveling since blue items are generally difficult to find, and crafted items are always a great help to balancing your stats while leveling. An additional bonus is that all crafted items except epics have a free rune slot for a level 1 to 4 rune.

For endgame, high level crafters can actually craft level 39 epics or level 40 blues which have nearly as good stats. These items are useful basically for all endgame.

Can I make a profit with crafting?

At first, no way. Eventually, maybe. Crafted endgame gear can sell for great amounts and bring you a nice profit. To get that far, however, you’re going to have to spend a lot of gold in materials to level up your profession, and it will take a very long time for you to cover all the expenses.

If you plan to create gear for yourself as you level, you’re looking to spend a lot of gold as well. Having a supplier friend (or alt) helps; they can supply you with the materials and you can create gear; hopefully for the both of you if you happen to use the same armor type.

Where do I get the materials required for crafting?

You need two or three kinds of materials, depending on the item you’re crafting. The one you will always need is materials from a supplier; another player with a supplying profession. Leather pieces, cloth pieces and ores are these kinds of items. These are the hardest to get – it helps a lot to have a supplier friend (or an alt). You should check AH frequently or just shout out in zone for a supplier partner.

In addition you will always need some materials you can buy from your trainer, and for the highest level gear you will also need items that drop from mobs.

2. Starting Crafting
To start crafting items, you need to have learned the profession, of course. In addition, you need to buy the crafting tools for your profession: Tailoring Kit, Leatherworker’s Tool Belt or Portable Forge. You can buy these tools from your profession trainer for a few silver.

To start crafting, right-click on your profession tools. A window opens showing all the possible recipes you know at this point. You learn higher level recipes automatically as you level your profession.

The recipe window should be understandable enough. On the left you see the item you attempt to craft, on the right you see the materials required to craft the item. The number on the far left tells what level you need to have on your profession skill to try crafting that item.

You will notice three different versions of each item on the left; you can see the exact stats by hovering your mouse over the icons. Which of the three versions you will get depends on how well you do in the actual crafting. The one on the right is usually the one you want.

To add materials, drag them from your bag or right-click on them in your bag. Once you add the required materials, all recipes that are not compatible with those materials are removed. When enough materials for a recipe are added, the recipes turn from red to white, meaning they can be worked on. To start crafting, select the recipe you want and click the Craft button in the lower left.

3. Crafting Items

Once you’ve chosen the recipe and used the required materials, you are taken to the crafting screen. This is where the magic happens, and this is where the inexperienced crafter will get confused.

In the crafting screen you have the item parameters on the left; preview of the item you’re getting with the current parameters on the right; and randomization icons at the top.

Item Parameters

There are three different parameters that affect the item you’re crafting: Complexity, Quality and Success Rate. The current value of the parameter is displayed in the circle in the middle.

– Complexity affects the level of the crafted item.
If in the recipe screen you started crafting level 20 pants, but your complexity is -2, you’ll end up with level 18 pants instead. This works the other way too: +2 complexity will give you a level 22 item. Different level items have different stats, so be careful – getting the exact level item you want may be difficult as you need to hit an exact number of Complexity.

– Quality affects the quality of the crafted item.
Quality 0 or worse will give a worthless gray item; Quality 1-4 will give a green grade item; and Quality 5 or better will give you a blue grade item. Epic recipes have the grades increased by one: Quality 0 is green, 1-4 blue and 5 or better purple.

Quality is the most important parameter when you’re trying to craft gear to use or sell. Green items are rarely worth too much rejoicing, so blue is the one you’ll want. This means you’ll have to get the Quality to 5 or better.

– Success Rate simply affects whether the crafting succeeds or not.
1 or better is what you want; 0 or worse will give you worthless trash instead of the item you want.

Parameter Modifiers

Every parameter is given a random starting value. For low level items the starting values are always 0 or better; for highest level items the starting values are never positive and 0 is the best you can hope for. In the above example, the starting value for Complexity is 1, Quality 1 and Success Rate 0.

To this starting value, both a negative and a positive modifier is added. The way the modifiers work is simple enough: If you have a starting value of 1, negative modifier of -1 and a positive modifier of 2, your final value will be 2 (1 – 1 + 2). The actual value, displayed in the circle in the middle, is automatically adjusted as you lock down your modifiers.

To choose a modifier, simply click on the modifier button. This modifier will then be locked and the final value shown in the circle will be adjusted accordingly. All the other modifiers will then be randomized.

Once you have chosen a value for each of the six modifiers, the piece of gear is complete and can be looted!

Randomizations

You are given an amount of modifier randomizations to help you in your crafting. They are displayed on the die icon in the top right. The number on the left shows the amount of free randomizations you have left. As you level up your profession, you will get more free randomizations, up to a total of 6. The number on the right shows the number of Equipment Refiners you have left – these are Item Shop items that give you extra randomizations for a fee. The free randomizations will always be used first and Equipment Refiners when you have none left. To use a randomization, click on the die icon.

For clarity: in the above example, I have 6 free randomizations left and 136 refiners left. (Yes I know, that’s a lot of refiners. I got them when there was a sale on >_>)

Affecting the Modifiers

There is more to the modifiers, however.

There are five different icons next to the randomization button. Each of these icons represents a positive or negative modifier. These icons are added up to form the modifiers you can choose from.

In this example there are two Quality Reduction icons, two Quality Enhancement icons and one Complexity Reduction icon. When you look at the modifier buttons, you can see their effects:

– two Quality Reduction icons -> there is a -2 Quality modifier
– two Quality Enhancement icons -> there is a +2 Quality modifier
– one Complexity Reduction icon -> there is a -1 Complexity modifier
– no Complexity Enhancement or Success Rate Reduction icons -> they are +0 and -0 respectively

The positive Success Rate modifier has been locked at +2 so it is not affected anymore.

Why is all this so important then? When you use your randomizations, you can lock down the icons you do not want to randomize. You do this by simply clicking on the icon. After the icon is locked down, once you use your randomization all the other icons will be randomized, but the ones you locked down will stay put.

In the above example, I’m trying to make a pair of blue grade pants, so I need to get the Quality to 5 or better. I have two Quality Enhancement icons which is quite nice to start with, but not enough for a blue item (you can see the preview showing a pair of green pants).

Trying to get more Quality, I lock down the two Quality Enhancements and use a randomization.

Luckily, I get two more Quality Enchancements with my first roll (no, it’s not always that easy). With four of them, the positive Quality modifier is now +4. Since the starting value was 1, +4 is enough to bring Quality to 5, so I go ahead and take it:

The Quality value is updated to 5, and the preview already tells the good news: with the current values I can already get blue pants. Now all I need to do is get suitable values for all the other modifiers~

…and I can loot a nice pair of blue level 15 pants.

4. Leveling your Profession

Each time you successfully craft an item, there is a chance your profession level will rise by 1. The exact mechanics of this are a little unclear to me, but I have picked up a few things from experience.

– The higher the level requirement of the crafted item, the higher your chance of gaining a profession level. If your profession level is 200, you should try to craft an item with a level requirement of 195 or more. 190 or so would be fine too but with it there is already a chance the level will not rise; anything lower will more often than not fail to raise your level.

– To have a chance of gaining a level, you have to successfully craft a piece of gear. Trash won’t do. The quality, however, doesn’t seem to matter – a green grade item has just as high a chance to raise your level as a purple grade item. So basically you need a Success Rate of 1 or better and Quality of 1 or better.

– The more randomizations you use, the less chance you have of gaining a level. If you want to just power-level your profession, forget about trying to make those blues; just try to get that Quality 1 and Success Rate 1 as quickly as possible, preferably without using any randomizations at all.

Leveling your profession will get rather expensive in the higher levels since you need to create a ton of high level gear and the materials for them aren’t exactly cheap. Tailors and leatherworkers should try to find a disassembler friend if they can: they can give the crafted items to the disassembler and have him rip them apart for mats right away. It still won’t be free, but at least more manageable.

5. Tips for Crafting High Quality Gear

To make this chapter easier to understand, I suggest trying out your tool kit and playing around with it a little before you read much further, just so you can understand what I’m going to say more clearly. Also, experience is the best teacher, and I’m sure you can develop your own good ways of making high quality gear. However, sharing my own experiences might be useful to some of you, so here you are~

As you should know by now, to craft gear of the highest quality, you need:
– The exact complexity you want; exactly 0 to get the item you chose from the recipes. For epic items, anything 0 or better.
– Quality of 5 or better
– Success Rate of 1 or better

The most difficult of these to obtain is the Quality of 5, obviously. Since you can only get a total of +5 from the parameters, the starting quality has to be 0 or better for you to have any chance. If the starting Quality is -1 or worse, and you don’t care about leveling your profession, you can just quit the crafting attempt right away and start over. When you quit the crafting attempt, you don’t lose all your materials – you only lose one of each kind.

Once you get to the high level gear, Complexity can often start as low as -3. In this case you basically need +4 from the parameters to craft the item. In these cases, I give as big a priority to Complexity as I do to Quality; though often I just quit the attempt soon enough to save my refiners.

While trying to get the high quality item, I roughly follow the following pattern. In order of priority, from top to bottom:

– If Complexity or Success Rate starts very much negative (-2 for example) and the parameters give enough to make it positive (+3 for example) I take that instantly

– If Quality random parameters give +2 or better, I lock them and try to get to 5 Quality

– If Complexity of Success Rate has started at -2 or worse and there are random parameters for +2 or better, I lock them and try to get them high enough

– If there is any parameter I can “secure”, I do it. For example: Success Rate has started at -1, I have locked a +2 on the positive side and there is a -0 on the negative side. I take the -0 to ensure I don’t end up with everything else finished but an unlucky -1 in Success Rate messing it all up.

– If there is nothing better, I take any -0 or any positive that’s so high a -1 on the negative side wouldn’t matter.

– If there is nothing better, I take any positive that’s barely good enough (I’ll need a -0 for that parameter later on).

– If there is nothing better, there’s really no other choice but to use a randomization. If there’s a random +1 I need to improve, might as well lock it.

Crafting blue items is pretty easy until level 25 or so. After that, it gets harder and harder as the starting parameters get worse and worse, and for endgame gear it’s very rare to get no negatives in the starting values. The only way to craft high quality high level gear reliably is to use refiners. It will get cheaper in the long run too as you lose materials with each failed attempt and especially the Soul Fragments needed for epic items are hard to find and usually expensive to buy. If you don’t want to use gpotatoes, you can usually find someone who will sell you the refiners for gold; a set of 10 is 90 gpotatoes.

It is possible to get epics without having to use any refiners, I’ve managed to do it a few times – but you may need literally dozens of attempts for it. Using the Item Shop items will save time, money and most importantly your nerves. Failing attempt after attempt will get really really frustrating. >_>

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That was my guide, I hope it was useful. Now go craft yourself some gear!